Growing
a Democratic Culture: John Commons on the Wiring of Civil Societyby Philip Agre

Is
the Internet a friend of democracy? The prevailing discourse
says no, that the Internet is actually the end of democracy,
and that democratic laws can no longer be enforced. This discourse
is not only hostile to democracy, of course -- it is hostile
to government as such, and it speaks of "government"
in a way that makes no distinction between constitutional democracy
and totalitarian fascism. This is the legacy of Friedrich Hayek,
among others, extremist opponents of extremism for whom any
amount of democracy, no matter how legitimate, inevitably leads
to harder stuff.

Whatever
their utility as political prescriptions, these philosophies
have usefully directed attention to the complex and variegated
institutional field through which the great bulk of any society
is actually organized. Marx had no time for these institutions
of civil society, which he regarded as epiphenomena of the essentially
very simple structures through which a society and its citizens
were defined (Keane 1988). But civil society is now exceedingly
popular, in a striking way, throughout the world and across
the political spectrum (Keane 1998), whether as a counterbalance
to the overreaching of the state, as an integral constituent
of democracy, or as the real and only substance of a free society.

Yet the
libertarian commitment to civil society is unstable. Civil society,
almost by definition, consists of intermediaries: organizations
that orchestrate and subserve a wide variety of social relationships.
But as Dominique Colas (1997) has observed, the concept of civil
society did not enter European social thought as a liberal antidote
to absolutism; its root meaning does not oppose it to the state.
Rather, civil society was originally opposed to certain extreme
forms of Protestantism that, in overthrowing the putative autocracy
of the Church, also sought to destroy all intermediaries and
all representations -- a mystical radicalism that sought to
eliminate all obstacles to an unmediated communion with God.
Political and technical ideas are routinely found to descend
from secularized versions of medieval theology, and thus here
the radicalism of modern libertarians echoes in some detail
the origins of the concept of civil society -- not it supporters
but its enemies: the smashers of idols, the extremist opponents
of centralized authority, the militants seeking not to create
their own intermediary institutions but to eliminate them altogether.

So it is,
for example, that so many contemporary authors who seem to speak
Hayek's language in fact leave no room in their language for
government at all, not even the minimal constitutional framework
that is supposed to administer the rule of law. They are anarchists,
and they are not concerned about money laundering, or pedophiles,
or any of the genuine if overhyped evils of the age. What matters
above all is the power of the network to connect anyone to anyone,
to circumvent anything, to short-circuit any intermediary, and
therefore supposedly to destroy all hierarchies of whatever
sort. The Church hierarchy, the state hierarchy, the monopoly
-- all will be smashed, all destroyed, all of their atoms scattered
by the ecstasy of the bits. This technological teleology, this
electronic eschatology, is, we are given to understand, the
information revolution to end all revolutions.

But it is
not so. Nothing like that is happening. Intermediaries are changing,
to be sure, multiplying and dividing, their functions rebundling
into different configurations, but they are as necessary as
ever. They are consolidating, indeed, increasing their geographic
scope. States are not shrinking, and in fact they are compensating
for the global reach of technology by creating a vast network
of undemocratic and nontransparent global treaty organizations.
Mediation and representation, with all of the good and evil
that they imply, are the very essence of the age. Once we see
this, we can see at last the real upshot of the technology,
the real action that it has already set in motion. It is not
the elimination of civil society, any more than of the state.
It is, however, in both realms, the renegotiation of the working
rules of every institution of society.

This conception
of social institutions as sets of working rules that govern
the roles and relationships of their participants belongs to
John Commons (1934). Largely forgotten now, Commons was the
mechanic philosopher of the New Deal. A printer, he eventually
became a professor of economics and public administration at
the University of Wisconsin, and in that position he trained
many members of the generation that built the American welfare
state. As the welfare state has come under ideological assault,
Commons has been forgotten, mentioned only by a handful of legal
theorists. All theories of institutions are largely compatible;
they seem different on the surface because they all overgeneralize
from the particular case with which the author is most familiar.
Commons' theory started from his experience of the negotiation
of work rules in printing shops through collective bargaining,
and that was the paradigm that he brought to every institution
he considered. He did not imagine that every set of rules arises
through the same kind of formal mechanism by which union contracts
are negotiated. He does not presuppose that organized associations
of buyers and sellers will necessarily delegate representatives
to negotiate over a long table the form contracts and other
customary rules that govern a given industry at a given point
in history. Nonetheless, Commons' project was to investigate
the variety of mechanisms by which the stakeholder groups in
a given institution do act collectively to carve out a space
for their own customs and practices alongside and by compromise
with those of everyone else.

Commons
saw no better example of this process than the rise and evolution
of the common law, in which successive social classes -- merchants
at one point, industrialists at another, and then industrial
labor -- wrote elements of their practices and values into the
law as it emerged to govern the particular relationships of
institutional life. How this worked in practice was a matter
for investigation. Normatively, the point was not for any one
group to win out, but quite the contrary for every group to
be able to hold its own, neither imposing its complete set of
preferred rules on everyone else nor having anyone else's rules
completely imposed on them.

As increasingly
complex social relationships are mediated by networked information
technology, we are becoming accustomed to the idea that the
protocols of these mediated interactions -- the "code"
in Larry Lessig's terms -- constitutes a set of working rules
in very much the sense that Commons suggests. Computers, like
institutions generally, both enable and constrain, and both
computers and institutions are, in one important aspect anyway,
discourses made material -- made, that is, into machinery that
governs to some degree the lives of the people who use it. Even
when they are not formally part of the government, and even
when they have no legal force, institutions and computers both
govern, and it is this much larger sense of governance that
Commons views as the deep underlying unity of democratic government
and democratic society. It is most unlikely, after all, that
one can exist without the other, and if the Internet encourages
a democratic society then it does so by promoting the diverse
mechanisms of collective bargaining by which a democratic society
orders its affairs.

The necessity
for such mechanisms is clear. By providing a general mechanism
for moving digital information and a general platform for constructing
digital information utilities, the Internet provides new opportunities;
it opens a vast new design space both for technology in the
narrow sense and for the institutionalized social relationships
within which the Internet is embedded. The Internet also necessitates
a renegotiation of institutional rules in a more urgent way
by destabilizing the balance of forces to which any successful
negotiation gives form; by lending itself to the amplification
of some forces and not others, the Internet undermines many
of the institutionalized accommodations through which stakeholder
groups with distinct interests and powers have gotten along.

It is not
only the Internet that has such effects, of course; control
over the legislature is a much more direct means of upsetting
existing institutional arrangements, and more factors than information
technology drive the disruptions of globalization. Nonetheless,
the Internet, far from transporting its believers into the unmediated
perfection of cyberspace, is unfreezing a multitude of thoroughly
secular institutional arrangements right here on earth, and
is posing the challenge of how these arrangements might be remade,
both efficiently and equitably, in a much more digital world.

Fortunately,
what the Internet necessitates it also facilitates. If the working
rules of universities will be remade through a negotiation between
professors and students, among others; if the medical system
will be remade through a negotiation between physicians, patients,
and insurers, among others; if the political system will be
remade through a negotiation among citizens and their representatives,
among others; then the main impact of the Internet has been
to provide tools that allow each of these stakeholder groups
to associate and, each in their own way, to press their interests.
Once again the paradigm of collective bargaining can mislead
if it is taken too literally. The point is not that every social
group forms its own union, or even necessarily its own organization,
and the point is not that the Internet necessarily facilitates
any kind of formal bargaining process. Collective bargaining
can be mediated by a great diversity of institutional forms,
and it is the genius of the Internet to be indifferent to the
details of such things.

The Internet
makes visible a layer of social process that is more fundamental
than organizations, and just as fundamental as institutions,
namely the customs by which people who have something in common
think together. Before collective bargaining comes collective
cognition, and collective cognition in its various modes is
greatly facilitated by the various community-building mechanisms
of the Internet. Ideologies can form in the networked community
of computer programmers; news can spread in the networked community
of nurses; experiences can be shared in the networked community
of cancer patients; patterns can be noticed by the networked
community of pilots; agendas can be compared by the networked
community of environmental activists; ideas can be exchanged
in the networked community of entrepreneurs; stories can be
told within the networked community of parents; and so on.

This sort
of cognitive pooling is not an unambiguous good, of course;
if taken too far, it can turn the community into a weakened
intellectual monoculture. Nonetheless, in many cases the Internet
is amplifying collective cognition in ways that equalize playing
fields for all. Cancer patients must no longer confront the
medical and insurance systems as individuals. Parents can listen
to other parents who have been in their shoes. Small players
can learn what angles the big players are likely to work. Collective
cognition is not the same as collective action, much less formally
organized collective bargaining. But it is the soil from which
these more complex phenomena of solidarity grow. Without the
habits of association, without the cultivated taste for sharing,
without the concrete experience of helping others and being
helped in turn, without the very idea that others face the same
situation as you, a democratic culture cannot grow. Whatever
its failings, the Internet fertilizes the soil of democratic
culture.

The question,
of course, is whether it does so enough -- whether the Internet
provides the conditions for every social group, no matter how
spread out, to take its rightful place at the table, to play
its own role in renegotiating all of the social institutions
in which it takes part. And the answer, just as clearly, is
no. No technology is ever a sufficient condition for anything.
It facilitates, but it doesn't do the job for us. To truly build
a democratic society, it will be necessary to build new social
forms -- new ideas, new movements, and new organizations that
are adequate the opportunities and challenges of a networked
world.

The role
of political organizations must change. No longer must an organization
carry the full burden of organizing the collective cognition
of the social group that it claims to represent. This is good
when it frees resources for other purposes, and it is bad when
it reduces the binding force that makes membership in an organization
attractive in the first place. It is good when it reduces the
arbitrary power of the intermediaries through whom the information
had flowed, and it is bad when it makes consensus-building and
leadership impossible. What, then, is the role of an organization
in a networked world? An organization can put people into complex
situations like legislatures and standards bodies, where there
is still no substitute for being there. It can conduct the research
that requires pulling together more information than any individual
could manage. It can maintain the relationships that make actual
negotiations possible. And it can build the legitimacy that
is required to call for a solidary action. These are all classical
functions of an organization, and they will not go away. But
they will all happen in a much more dynamic environment, and
they will only work if they draw upon and encourage the power
of collective cognition, rather than trying to channel it. This
is hard, because it is much easier to deal with a centralized
representative than a sprawling associative community. But it
is the democratic way, and it is the principal hope today for
a democratic society.

This perspective
on democracy certainly has its limitations. Commons had a clear
conception of institutions, but the language of collective bargaining
was dangerously indeterminate in its prescriptions for the political
system, as his misguided endorsement of Mussolini's corporate
state suggests. But this is perhaps the central question of
democracy in its newly wired manifestation: what is the proper
relationship between collective cognition among communities
of shared interest and the actual formal mechanisms of the state?
Unequal access to the means of association is already a tremendous
force for inequality, especially in the United States where
professionalized lobbying on behalf of the powerful has been
raised to a high art.

The answer
cannot ride on the sort of bargaining that can be bought. Instead,
it must ride on the massed creativity of a diverse people in
diverse situations, all bringing their own experience to bear
on the situations of others. If the Internet is a friend of
democracy then democracy will be won principally on the ground,
and the central task for democratic theory right now is to understand
this ground, and to be useful to the innumerable people of good
will who are out there trying to build on it.